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Welcome to Northeastern University’s science and research blog. We call it iNSolution because that’s what our faculty and student researchers are in the business of—finding solutions to societal problems while simultaneously contributing to the fundamental knowledge base of their respective fields.

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We want to hear your ideas and endeavors, your questions, compliments, and complaints. Please feel free to email us at t.singer@neu.edu or get in touch the old fashioned way by calling 617.373.7394. Also, don’t forget to comment on the posts! A blog is better when its readers are also part of its voice.

Persistent little buggers

Ed Yong might be my favorite blogger. He’s cer­tainly the most pro­lific one I’m aware of (don’t sign up for his twitter feed if you don’t want to be inun­dated all day long — how do people keep up with that sort of thing?!). But more impor­tantly he’s enter­taining and good at what he does.

So imagine my excite­ment when I saw his byline on a mag­a­zine article about one of our very own fac­ulty in the most recent issue of New­Sci­en­tist. I’ve men­tioned Pro­fessor Kim Lewis a couple of times, but I don’t think I’ve talked specif­i­cally about his theory of “per­sister” cells.

Yong calls them “sleeper cells” in the article (of the same name) and does a good job explaining the theory, which attempts to explain how some bac­te­rial infec­tions per­sist after antibi­otic treatment.

One common and accepted mech­a­nism is antibi­otic resis­tance. Here indi­vidual bac­teria with muta­tions that make them resis­tant to the drug sur­vive while their un-​​mutated neigh­bors die. Over time, all that’s left are strong, antibi­otic resis­tant, mutated bacteria.

Bac­te­rial per­sis­tence, on the other hand, says that a small subset of bac­te­rial cells spe­cialize in sur­vival by “going to sleep” when con­di­tions are bad (ie., when an antibi­otic comes around).

In the last few years, Lewis and his team have begun to show that bac­te­rial per­sis­tence is respon­sible for dis­ease areas that were pre­vi­ously thought to depend on antibi­otic resis­tance. For example, Cystic Fibrosis patients often die from pneu­monia despite the fact that cul­tures of the incrim­i­nating bac­teria die when exposed to antibi­otics in the lab. In 2010 Lewis’ team showed that these patients actu­ally have sig­nif­i­cantly more per­sister cells than normal.

Yong’s article goes into a bit more detail about other researchers in the field who are attempting to find ways to kill off per­sister cells, for example by punching holes in their cell walls.

You’ll be able to access the full article online for a few days with a free account, but it will soon go behind the pay­wall and then I can’t do any­thing for you unless you want to drop by the office and read the paper copy (gasp!).

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